THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 (2009) - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

For all its hi-fi sets, frenetic chase scenes, shouted ultimatums and heavyweight cast, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 is a movie that fails to engage. It's like the TRANSFORMERS 2 of heist movies - so full of high-voltage action shots that plot, character and audience empathy are flushed down the toilet. Are we surprised? After all, the movie has been remade by the ultimate Lads Mag Director, Tony Scott, of TOP GUN fame and DOMINO and DEJA VU mediocrity. But maybe I am a bit surprised to find that this utterly predictable movie was written by the man who wrote LA CONFIDENTIAL. Essentially, the movie is about a psychopath (John Travolta chewing up the scenery) who boards a New York metro train, takes the passengers hostage and demands a bunch of money. He forms a weird relationship with a rail dispatcher with a shady past (Denzel Washington), and spurns the attentions of the cops (John Turturro) and the Mayor (James Gandolfini). The movie could've been so much better - a fracked up psychological cat-and-mouse game between hostage-taker and dispatcher - a discourse on the corruption of politicians and the police. On a technical level, it should've evoked the claustrophobia of the hijacked metro-cab and the wider menace of The City. In the end, it's all just a convenient hook to hang a chase scene on. Weak, weak, weak. Go watch INSIDE MAN instead.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 is on release in the USA, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan and Argentina. It opens in the final week of July in the UK, Greece, Malaysia, Austria, Spain, Belgium, France, Morocco, Switzerland, Israel, Kazakhstan, Finland and Lithuania. It opens on August 6th in Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Romania. It opens on August 13th in the Czech Republic. It opens on September 4th in Slovakia, Brazil, Japan and Mexico. It opens on September 11th in Bulgaria; on September 17th in Cyprus, Portugal and Italy.

DEJA VU - if CSI were a movie

DEJA VU is a Jerry Bruckheimer produced film. That means you get a very slick, polished entertainment package with not a faint echo of his hit show CSI. DEJA VU is also helmed by Tony Scott. This means you get the glossy look of a hi-spend ad campaign coupled with incessantly roving camera-work - it's all camera pans, helicopter shots and hi-def explosions. Combined, we get one of the most pollished but emotionally manipulative opening sequences of a movie that I can remember. With practically no dialogue the camera swoops over a ferry in New Orleans on a sunny Mardi Gras. The ferry is filled with bouncing babies with blonde curls, smiling beautiful yuppie couples and US navy men in shining white uniform. The Beach Boys - the band of sun-kissed all-american happy summers - are playing on a car radio. You don't get more patriotic or Hallmark card than that. And then we get the terrorist explosion. Scott doesn't hold back from depicting quasi-9/11 images. We have soldiers on fire jumping into the water.

And then we segue to Denzel Washington doing his trademark schtick. He just oozes integrity and to see him - an ATF officer - scouting the crime scene - is to feel his righteous indignation. He is a good man. The movie then does around 30 minutes CSI work where Denzel's character realises that to solve the terrorist attack the FBI (headed up by Val Kilmer) will have to solve the murder of an attractive local woman. These thirty minutes are entertaining in much the same way as CSI - and as a guage to whether you'll like the movie, ask yourself whether you still get cheap thrills from seeing an officer with tweezers and a plastic baggie.

The next thirty minutes are a little more dull. Denzel and Val use a cool "live feed" surveillance mechanism that gives a one-time view of a limited radius 4 days ago to watch. They pretty much sit around watching the murdered woman. Denzel falls in love. It's all a little pedestrian. The writers create an obstacle - the limited radius of the feed - which forces Denzel into a sup'ed-up hummer to track the baddie - thus providing the audience with a satisfyingly gnarly car chase to break the boredom.

The next twenty minutes or so see Denzel force the FBI into a confession that this is not so much a video feed as a means of actually interacting with the past. He uses this feature to track the terrorist and bring him to justice. Here lies the natural end of an above-average crime procedural with the added boost of a discretely used sci-fi doo-dad.

Sadly, the film does NOT end here but continues in an end sequence that was designed to provide an emotional payoff. Problem is that it tips us over the line of willing suspension of disbelief regarding the time-gadget and opens up a variety of plot problems to do with different time-lines and whatnot. It's a great shame. What could have been a rather subversive thriller becomes an emotionally over-loaded, structural mess. Still, if you just walk out of the cinema after Jim Caviezel's big scene, you'll have had 90 minutes of pure popcorn entertainment.

DEJA VU is already on release in the US, Canada, Mexico, Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Venezuala, Thailand, Indonesia, Greece, Israel, Singapore, Latvia, Belgium, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Iceland, Italy and the UK. It opens in Sweden, Hungary, Estonia, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand on the 22nd and in Denmark, Norwar, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic over Christmas. It opens in Chile, Hong Kong, Poland and Turkey on January 5th and in Argentina on the 11th. It finally rolls into Australia on January 18th and Japan on March 24th.

DOMINO - like a ferret on crystal meth

DOMINO is a failure of a movie. Shot and edited like a ferret on crystal myth, this movie is the most likely to cause motion sickness since RAG TALE. With so many freeze-frames, jump cuts, colour-saturated action sequences, it takes a real effort to actually concentrate on what is actually going on. Perhaps this is the intention of the director, because the plot is poor. Do not be fooled by the fact that the central concept is fascinating or that the screenplay was penned by Richard Kelley, the wuenderkind who wrote and directed DONNIE DARKO. Donnie Darko was a great flick but let's tell it like it is: Kelly screwed up a perfectly fascinating tale. For DOMINO is a very loose biopic of a woman called Domino Harvey. The daughter of a famous actor and a supermodel, Domino reacted against the stuffy British establishment and the Beverly Hills crowd. She got thrown out of a bunch of boarding schools and eventually became a bounty hunter in South L.A. Now, that's a story, and Tony Scott, director of TOP GUN, TRUE ROMANCE and SPY GAME, thought so too.

Here's the glitch. Kelly or Scott or whoever had the brainwave of overlaying Domino's story with a heist movie. Worse, a heist plot that is difficult to believe, so reliant is it on absurd coincidences. Then, just to add to the general chaos obscuring the central story, they added a whole bunch of fascinating but totally out-of-place discourse on pop-culture. There are lots of fun critiques of reality TV, for instance, but the satire is blunt and moves away from the point.

All of which makes DOMINO a rather uninvolving and annoying viewing experience. Who knew? A Christopher Walken film I would happily not see again.

DOMINO is on release in the US and UK. It goes on release in France on November 23rd 2005 and in Austria and Germany on December 29th.